How One Can Reduce American "Oil Addiction"?

More than thirty years have passed since the Western countries experienced one of the most serious economic oil crises of the 70's. Undoubtedly some technological innovations have been introduced and economies of most of Western countries are not so oil dependent as in the middle of the seventies. Nevertheless the economies of major developed nations still consume large amount of oil and energy resources.

A few people would argue that due to the development of today's world economy, the demand on the oil or energy resources can be saturated to the full extent in the nearest future. With rapid economic growth of China and more rapid economic growth in India, there are more than enough reasonable grounds to suggest that the demand on oil will be increasing in the next several years or even decades to come.

The largest economy of the world - American economy depends on oil and many energy resources as well. Despite the fact that the USA is one of the largest producers of oil in the world it still has to  import large amount of oil and other energy resources, from various regions of the world. Current  situation in the Middle Eastern region, where large deposits of oil are located is quite volatile and even despite the fact that most of the countries located in Arabian peninsula are widely regarded by many professionals as one of the steadfast allies of the Western countries, there are few reasons to believe that situation will remain the same for a long period of time as dissatisfaction with the policy of the USA in the Middle East is growing and few Arab governments (even if the systems of the governments are not democratic one) can ignore and disparage public opinions in their nations.

Insurgents and other terrorist groups try, not unsuccessfully to damage oil refinery facilities in Iraq in order to obstruct the activities of American and Iraq governments to rebuild and strengthen democracy in this country; on the other hand instability in Iraq does not allow optimists to think that the price on oil will somehow decrease in the nearest future. 

That is why so many specialists accepted favorably recent state of the union address by the president of the USA, in which he stated that the USA would decrease its consumption of oil and become less oil dependent nation. So how this problem can be resolved? What lessons actually were learned from the previous oil crisis? With such incredible advance in technology and mass communication would it not be possible to devise some plan to reduce the dependency of the USA on oil?

Undoubtedly the USA has sufficient financial resources and enough technological capacities to resolve this problem; however it looks like the will to resolve it is lacking. Recently even much poor countries such as Brazil has introduced  new energy saving technologies (for instance it tries to substitute ethanol for oil), many states have also made some notable progress in the development of solar energy technologies which would  allow them to reduce their consumptions of traditional energy sources such as oil and energy.

However these nations are rather the exception from the rule. President has recently proposed increasing of the financing of research projects which might lessen the impact of the looming crisis that the country could face in the next several years; yet one could argue that these research programs will not produce substantial results in the nearest future. So the only solution might be effective introduction of existing energy saving technologies that are already available in the USA and around the globe.